Moby Dick: or, the White Whale eBook

that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime
everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross
to the other side of the deck was like walking up
the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned
and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her
bulwarks and cabins were started from their places,
by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes
and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains,
to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low
had the whale now settled that the submerged ends
could not be at all approached, while every moment
whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking
bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.

“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried
Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a
devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we
must do something or go for it. No use prying
there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run
one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut
the big chains.”

“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg,
and seizing the carpenter’s heavy hatchet, he
leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began
slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few
strokes, full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding
strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap,
every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the
carcase sank.

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently
killed Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has
any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it.
Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy,
with its side or belly considerably elevated above
the surface. If the only whales that thus sank
were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their
pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy
and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert
that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific
gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this
absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not
so. For young whales, in the highest health,
and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut
off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their
panting lard about them! even these brawny, buoyant
heroes do sometimes sink.

Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less
liable to this accident than any other species.
Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales
do. This difference in the species is no doubt
imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity
of bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone
sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this incumbrance
the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are
instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several
days, the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than
in life. But the reason of this is obvious.
Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious
magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon.
A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then.
In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays
of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of
sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of
rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know
where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.